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The evening in the laboratory stretched thick and colourless, like cooled gelatin. Zandik sat at the table, propping his temple on his fist, leafing through the segments’ weekly reports simply because he needed something to occupy his hands and eyes. Number 35’s handwriting was atrocious; number 18’s was excessively diligent, all curlicues that set his teeth on edge. He turned a page without having read a single line.
Zandik loved this time of day, when the segments scattered to their corners and he was left alone. He could finally take off the monocle, rub the bridge of his nose, permit himself to slouch. He could think. Or not think. Lately he preferred the latter.
Beyond the narrow window set almost at the ceiling, dusk had already thickened. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone outside. The day before yesterday, it seemed. His body ached from the prolonged sitting, and a dull, familiar pain pulsed at his temples, a loyal companion throughout four decades without proper sleep. He wanted coffee. But getting up felt like too much effort.
His thoughts drifted slowly, disjointedly. He turned over the nearest tasks in his mind: tomorrow a batch of expendable material was due to arrive, the chambers needed preparing, the reagents checking, a protocol for number 8 to be drawn up. Then a report to the Zapolyarny Palace. Then another report, this one for his personal archive, because Pierro had the habit of asking questions Zandik preferred to have answers to in advance. There were also the accumulated tissue samples to sort through, since the refrigerator was already running out of space. And he needed to check how number 45’s sutures were healing, the one who’d had a fragment transplanted last week…
He stopped short, because he heard footsteps.
Zandik hadn’t been expecting a new delivery today. A parcel he was expecting had arrived a couple of days ago, and the new expendable material wasn’t due until tomorrow. But when he heard the hasty click of heels against the tiled floor—someone junior, by the sound of it—he understood at once: something new had been brought in.
Zandik straightened up, put on his monocle, and with a quiet, almost inaudible sigh, prepared himself for the end of his solitude.
“Gunshot wound to the shoulder,” number 25 said, a little out of breath. “And some minor things. A gentleman from the banking sector. Sold out by his own people, no documents. Tough one. Had to inject anaesthesia because he was thrashing.”
Number 25 hauled the body to the operating table and dropped it there like a sack of bones.
Zandik rose from his chair heavily, with another sigh. Honestly, he had no desire to work this late, but he at least had to examine the specimen. To know what he’d be dealing with in the morning.
The man was dressed—surprisingly, given that he’d apparently just survived a gunfight—as though he were a model called in for a fitting at an atelier. A close-fitting coat of smooth, almost slippery-looking dark grey wool clung to the body like a lover, permitting not a single unnecessary fold. Zandik narrowed his eyes, studying the cut. The shoulder line was soft, without rigid padding, following the natural curve with the precision that is only achieved through bespoke tailoring. Not some off-the-rack rag. Custom work, and the client clearly knew what he needed. The seams were hand-stitched—he could distinguish them even in this dim light: small, with a barely perceptible lean characteristic of the old Snezhnayan fashion school. Beneath the coat, a white shirt of the finest silk with a delicate sheen; the top two buttons undone, exposing, without a trace of modesty, a slender neck and a suggestion of collarbones. The collar, starched and pressed, lay flawlessly despite the fabric being soaked through with blood.
Zandik leaned a little closer. From the fabric came a scent: white musk, bitter almond, something resembling tangerine blossom. The perfume had seeped so deeply into the wool and silk that even blood and gunpowder couldn’t overpower it; woven into the fabric along with it was the persistent smell of cigarettes. The patient smokes. Worth noting.
The trousers, with their provocative high waist and just the slightest flare at the hem, added the finishing chord to a silhouette that was elegant, and almost feminine in its proportions. Everything in this ensemble had been constructed with that particular, near-architectural attention to proportion that Zandik was more accustomed to seeing in the blueprints of complex instruments.
He pressed his lips together. A masterwork of tailoring worth half a year of one segment’s life lay before him, bloodied and unconscious. These types usually squealed the loudest when their trappings were stripped away.
Zandik circled the trolley with his hands clasped behind his back and continued the examination. The bullet had passed clean through, but the coat’s sleeve was past saving: the noble fabric was torn apart, saturated with dark, almost black blood in the operating light. He noted to himself that the lining—viscose, with a barely visible pinstripe—had suffered less. Fine lining, expensive. The patient’s fingers were long and pale, lying on his abdomen, limp but retaining their aristocratic quality in the slight curl of the phalanges. Zandik took hold of the left wrist, lifted it, turned it toward the light. Not a single ring, but thinner, paler strips of skin where they had been: on the ring finger, the index, the thumb. The rings had been removed. Before he was brought here, apparently. He carefully returned the hand to its place and moved on to the face.
Up close, the features proved even finer than they’d appeared from a distance. High cheekbones, a clean line of jaw, well-groomed brows. Lips pale and dry, with a barely visible crack on the lower one. Lashes long, dark, unnaturally thick for a man. And eyelids, tenderly closed, concealing what Zandik, as a doctor, was obliged to check.
He took the torch.
“Light. We’re going to check the pupillary reflex.”
He carefully lifted the right eyelid with his fingers. The iris turned out to be pale lilac. Smoky, the final layer of dusk before nightfall, amethyst diluted with milk. In the artificial light of the torch it appeared almost transparent, filled with weightless pigment that did not occur in nature. That, at any rate, was what Zandik had believed until this moment.
He held the eyelid open a fraction longer. Brought the torch closer, waiting for the pupil’s response, but his thoughts in that moment had nothing to do with neurology. The colour didn’t shift, didn’t drift into blue or violet. It was precisely lilac, pure, like a precious stone. Such pigmentation was rare, but explicable. Yet this shade… this isn’t a mutation, he thought. Or—a mutation, but of an order he had never before encountered.
Something shifted in his chest in the wrong direction. The way it happens when a component of a complex instrument that he’d considered defective turns out to be the missing link in the whole mechanism. Interesting. A modification? Rare pigmentation? Samples should be taken…
Zandik released the eyelid sharply, let the eye close again, and straightened up. His face remained unchanged, except that number 25 could have spotted from a kilometre away how his jaw shifted slightly to one side and his teeth clenched. He had to adjust the monocle—his hand had trembled and the little glass had slid down his cheekbone. He returned it to its place with a quick, almost rough movement.
“Prepare the operating field. We need to clean the wound and apply sutures.”
Number 25 blinked at him in surprise two or three times but never managed to summon the nerve to ask a question. Zandik turned away to the instruments, feeling a hot, scorching self-contempt for having permitted himself that fleeting weakness. Not admiration, he repeated to himself. Aesthetic gratification. Professional interest in a rare genotype. An ethical regard for the material. Anything, anything at all, but not this foolishness.
Number 25 stood motionless at the wall, ready to pass an instrument on request. Zandik washed his hands for a long time, as though he were putting off the inevitable. Hot water, alcohol, water again, antiseptic, water again. He pulled on fresh gloves, the tubber chilling his fingers. He approached the table. This time, he will do all of it himself.
His fingers slid across the smooth wool of the coat, found the half-open clasp—concealed—and unfastened it with a quiet, delicate sound. The fabric yielded reluctantly, as though unwilling to part with the body. Zandik pulled the sleeve from the right shoulder, the uninjured one, then carefully, millimetre by millimetre, freed the left as well. The patient’s arm slipped out of the sleeve and fell onto the operating surface, limp. The bullet had torn through the fabric, leaving a ragged crater with scorched edges; the blood had soaked through the lining completely, and the smell of it struck his nostrils. Zandik knew that smell better than the smell of his own soap.
The shirt came next. Hand-stitching, mother-of-pearl buttons, which Zandik undid one by one. Each one exposed more and more of pale skin, smooth as polished marble. Beneath the collarbones a faint web of veins, barely visible. On the ribs, bruises already forming—dark, with a purple-crimson cast. He worked in silence, only occasionally issuing short commands: “Scalpel,” “Clamp,” “Gauze.” But his fingers, contrary to years of habit, did not hurry. He caught himself undoing the buttons far too carefully, as though afraid of disturbing someone sleeping, and was angry at himself for it.
When the shirt had been removed and set aside, Zandik let his gaze rest on the body before him for a moment. A narrow ribcage, delicate collarbones, a long throat—all of it like an anatomical engraving from the old masters, only alive, slightly cooled but still breathing. He had seen hundreds of bodies. Thousands, counting by the years. But this one had been wrought with a certain deliberate, provocative harmony, as though nature had decided to play a joke and created a perfect specimen, then thrown it into a ditch with a bullet in the shoulder. Zandik gritted his teeth and focused on the wound.
“Light closer.”
Number 25 rolled the lamp in.
The bullet had passed through cleanly. The entry wound gaped just below the left shoulder joint, at the front. The exit—at the rear, higher, ragged, but without any serious bone fragments. The bone was intact, a great stroke of luck. Zandik pressed his fingers around the wound, assessing the swelling and the depth of the channel. Even through the glove he could feel how hot the skin was; the inflammation hadn’t started yet, but the body was already responding to the intrusion. The patient’s eyelids didn’t flicker, the anaesthesia held deep. Good. He began the cleaning.
Number 25 silently passed him a syringe of saline. Zandik flushed the wound channel generously, as the liquid ran down the pale skin onto the operating field, pinkish, faintly foaming at the wound’s edges. Under the scalpel the skin parted pliably, revealing the darker layer of tissue beneath, and Zandik paused for a moment to watch the fatty layer glisten in the lamp’s light. Strange. Because for the first time in a long while he was thinking not of the result but of the process.
He reached for the needle holder and accidentally knocked his elbow against the patient’s uninjured shoulder. The skin was unnaturally smooth, and warm even through the rubber. He pulled his hand back. Number 25 didn’t seem to notice, but Zandik had. And quietly, through his teeth, cursed himself.
He threaded the needle with silk and began laying the sutures. The inner row with absorbable thread, but when it came to the outer row his fingers slowed of their own accord. He caught himself making the stitches smaller, almost cosmetic, jeweller-fine. The way one sews expensive fabric. Or someone’s skin that one would like to preserve without scars. He laid the next suture a fraction sharper than he’d intended, and at that moment the patient jerked.
At first Zandik thought it was a reflex. A convulsion. These things happen; muscles contract even under anaesthesia, the body lives its own life. But then he heard a quiet, indistinct sound, an attempt to say something, and he raised his head.
The patient was looking at him.
Pupils dilated, breathing erratic. The anaesthesia held the body but not the mind, and he had surfaced ahead of time, like a swimmer thrown ashore by a wave. His head swayed to one side and then back, a drunken, slowed movement, and the clouded lilac gaze focused on Zandik’s face, looming a few inches away.
“Cold,” the patient exhaled. The voice was hoarse and faint, but it already carried some capricious, wayward intonation. “Why is it so cold? Is this a… crypt? Or are you… economising on heating?”
Zandik waited, gauging the degree of waking. If the patient was capable of forming coherent thoughts, then the dose had been insufficient. But that coherence was deceptive—the gaze was drifting, the pupils couldn’t hold focus.
“Dogs,” the patient continued, and the left corner of his lips twitched in a disdainful smirk. “Can’t even undress someone properly. I heard them cutting the sleeve. With scissors. Can you imagine? Scissors.” He blinked, slowly, cat-like, and his gaze came to rest on Zandik’s face again. “And you… who are you?”
Zandik had just opened his mouth when the patient didn’t let him answer.
“Tiffany,” he murmured, and something interested broke through his voice.
Zandik swallowed. He didn’t know what to do with that. The patient was delirious, but his delirium was strangely… coherent.
“Pigeon’s blood. The most expensive shade,” the patient added, and his gaze sharpened slightly, fixing on the red of Zandik’s iris. “Tiffany with red… works well together. Who would have thought…”
And all the while the patient continued. His gaze slid lower, from Zandik’s face to his shirt showing beneath the coat.
“Sapphire,” he murmured. “No, more cobalt. Altogether… like a gemstone.” He gave a faint, contemptuous but not unkind sound. “And at the same time… such an ugliness.”
“Ugliness,” spoken so lightly, almost tenderly. It wasn’t even an insult. It was the way one speaks of a work of art ruined by a single wrong detail, of a precious stone in a cheap setting.
The patient’s hand, the very one Zandik had just been treating for cuts, rose unsteadily. Zandik meant to pull back but was too slow. Cold, slightly trembling fingers touched his cheekbone, at the point where skin met a strand of hair, and slid lower, toward the angle of the jaw.
A finger traced down to the chin and stopped at the hollow beneath the lower lip. The patient narrowed his eyes, as much as the dilated pupils allowed, and exhaled, nearly whispering:
“Too old a setting… for such a stone.” His eyes had begun to roll back, but he held on, clinging to the thread of consciousness. “It should have been… a different face. More…” He stopped, searching for the word, and the word never came.
Number 25 pushed off from the wall as though he’d only been waiting for the signal. A cold needle slid into the vein of the uninjured arm. The patient shuddered, and his eyelids closed. His fingers slipped from Zandik’s face, catching the collar of his shirt as a parting gesture, and fell onto the operating table. Leaving on the skin the sensation of an icy touch, and a strange, inexplicable warmth where they had just rested.
Zandik shook his head sharply, and returned to his work. But his fingers, laying the next suture, still remembered the foreign touch. And in his ears, drowning out the steady hum of the ventilation, a hoarse, faint voice sounded, going through his features one by one, like precious stones.
He laid the sutures swiftly and flawlessly; the inner row with absorbable thread, the outer with silk, stitch by stitch. Then he moved on to the abrasions on the ribs—rinsed them, applied a healing ointment of his own invention, Formula V, thick, with an herbal smell, covered them with thin adhesive strips. The cut on the forearm required three neat sutures.
When it was all finished, he stripped off his gloves, dropped them in the tray, and went to the desk. The hand holding the pen did not tremble, but the lines came out sharper than usual. Description of Complaint: In addition to a through-and-through gunshot wound to the left upper arm, the patient presents with multiple superficial injuries sustained in a physical altercation. History: No known allergies. No history of past surgeries. Treatment: Debridement and suturing. Administration of Oral Capsule Formulation III and Topical Ointment Formulation V. Follow-up in 3 days. When he reached the line “Postoperative notes: Vital signs are stable. Patient has not yet been questioned regarding the cause of injury,” he permitted himself a short, caustic smile and added at the bottom, for himself: “Isn't being a bank clerk supposed to be a safe job?”
He set down the pen and reached for the bell to summon number 25 and order the patient moved to a ward, but changed his mind. He rose from the table himself, working the stiffness from his shoulders. The segment waited by the door.
“I’m finished. Take him to ward three, left corridor. Change him into a standard gown.”
Number 25 nodded in silence and began transferring the patient to the trolley. Zandik stood to one side, watching as the pale, limp body was rolled from the operating table, as the head fell back helplessly, exposing the long line of the throat. He followed it with his eyes until the trolley had been wheeled out into the corridor and the door had closed.
Zandik walked to the sink, washed his hands, without the earlier meditative quality now, simply to give them something to do. Dried them. Then went to the chair on which he’d neatly folded the patient’s coat and shirt, and stood still.
The fabric still carried the scent. He leaned in and inhaled it sharply, not knowing why. And immediately straightened up, irritated with himself. He gathered the clothes, carried them to the cabinet for personal belongings, locked it. Let them stay there. The patient wouldn’t need them for the time being.
He went out into the corridor and headed for ward three. His mind kept circling back to: “Tiffany with red works well together,” and he couldn’t determine what precisely had gotten under his skin. Patients said all manner of things under anaesthesia. Zandik supposed it was the intonation. Drunk but assured, as though this one actually knew something about precious stones and had decided, somewhere between life and death, to offer him an expert appraisal.
Idiocy.
Zandik paused for a second before entering. The ward was almost dark, only a narrow strip of light from the corridor fell across the bed where the patient lay. He’d been changed into a grey hospital gown, too wide in the shoulders and too short in the sleeves; the blanket had been pulled up to his chin. His hair, still damp from where number 25 had evidently rinsed the blood from it, lay spread across the pillow in dark coils. In sleep, the face looked even younger and more defenceless.
He looked at the sleeping figure and thought that tomorrow morning he would wake up and become a haughty, sharp-edged, spoiled banker again, who would demand his coat back and take issue with the quality of the gown. But for now for now he was simply a patient. Sleeping. Most importantly silent.
Zandik thought he heard breathing beyond the door—whether number 25 or one of the senior segments—and he straightened up, adjusted his monocle, went out into the corridor, and closed the door behind him. He stood on the other side for a minute still, with his palm pressed to the cold steel, then walked away at a quick, almost angry pace.
---
Consciousness returned not in waves, but in lurches. First sound: a low hum from the ventilation and a steady drip somewhere in the corner. Then smell—alcohol, something herbal, and no tobacco, he noted with disappointment. Then pain. A dull, aching nail in the left shoulder that someone had neglected to pull out. Feofan groaned aloud this time, unable to hold it back, and slowly, with effort, pried his eyelids apart.
The ward was grey and bleak. Bare walls, a flickering light, minimal furniture. And someone was sitting in the corner.
Feofan slid his eyes sideways and flinched with his whole body, which sent pain shooting through his shoulder. In the corner, on a chair, one leg crossed over the other and his fingers laced over his knee, sat a man. Tall, lean. White coat, dark blue shirt. Hair the colour of verdigris, in the half-dark it appeared almost dark, but when the stranger leaned slightly forward, the same vivid, copper patina flared in the lamplight. And eyes—red, scarlet, like pomegranate seeds—stared directly at him.
“Good morning,” the stranger said. Low voice, with a hint of a dry throat. “You slept for nearly four hours. How are you feeling?”
Feofan blinked and gathered the remnants of his thoughts into a fist. Four hours. He’d slept for four hours and this person had been sitting in the corner the whole time, watching? Or had he just come in? Either way, waking up under someone’s close scrutiny was… uncomfortable.
“You…” he began, and his voice treacherously broke into a rasp. “Who are you?”
“I’m Zandik. For some Dottore, Second of the Eleven Harbingers, if that means more to you.” The stranger didn’t move from his place. “Here and now, I am your attending doctor. The operation was a success.”
Feofan closed his eyes, processing the information. The Second Harbinger, in person, sitting at his bedside and informing him that the operation was a success. His career had certainly taken a tumble. He opened his eyes again and looked himself over: a hospital gown of some nondescript grey-blue, cheap fabric that chafed the skin. The coat, of course, had been removed. The rings too. Was the Second Harbinger in dire need of money? Why steal his rings, too?
“Do you… always sit in your patients’ wards while they sleep?” he asked, aiming to keep his voice steady. “Or have I been accorded special attention?”
Zandik tilted his head slightly. Something resembling a smile flickered in his red eyes.
“Special,” he answered, briefly. “Your case struck me as non-standard.”
Feofan wanted to say something sharp in reply, but suddenly stilled. His gaze had fixed on the doctor’s verdigris hair, his red eyes, and somewhere at the back of his skull, like an echo, something passed through him: “Tiffany… with red… works well together.” Whose words were those? When had he heard them? And why, looking at this man, did he have the strange, inexplicable feeling that he had already touched this face? Cold skin, a sharp cheekbone, the hollow below the lower lip… He blinked, dispelling the impression. Delirium. The lingering effects of the anaesthesia.
“You have a strange face,” slipped out of him before he could bite his tongue.
Zandik tensed almost imperceptibly.
“Excuse me?”
“I meant an unusual one,” Feofan corrected himself, cursing his own clumsiness with words. “Because of the hair and eye colour. I… think I saw something of the sort in a dream. Or somewhere. I don’t remember. The anaesthesia must have been good. What did you inject me with?”
“A standard compound. Possible side effects include confusion and false memories.” He came closer, stopped at the foot of the bed. “The bed is hard, I know. The gown is presumably not the height of comfort either. But at least no one is shooting at you anymore, which is progress. As you yourself said.”
Feofan blinked. He hadn’t said that. Or… had he? A gap in memory.
“Did I say that under anaesthesia?” he asked carefully.
“No. I simply inferred the direction of your thoughts.” Zandik curved his lips into something resembling a smirk. “You give the impression of someone who, even in a half-conscious state, would complain about the quality of the fabric.”
Feofan wanted to object, but instead let out a short, husky laugh.
“Would you like some water?”
“I’d like to smoke,” Feofan answered honestly. “But judging by the smell in this place, that’s not particularly welcomed here.”
“Correct.” Zandik picked up the glass of water from the bedside table and brought it to the patient’s lips. Feofan took several swallows, feeling the cool moisture cut through the dryness in his throat.
Feofan exhaled. As it always goes. Just when he decides for a moment that this grim figure is almost human, he is promptly reminded that he is a scientist and Feofan is a specimen.
“Understood,” he said, and closed his eyes. “Let’s get through the formalities, then. Name, circumstances, allergies. Ask your questions, Doctor. Only do sit down—you’re making me nervous, looming over me like that.”
Zandik sat and began asking questions.
“I can’t replace the bed—laboratory standard,” he said, drawing the chair closer. “But I’ll look for a better gown. Your clothing has been preserved, though it suffered. The coat is exceptional work. The atelier on Ineevyi Prospekt?”
“The atelier on Ineevyi Prospekt,” confirmed Feofan, surprise flickering in his eyes. “Heartening to find that in this part of the world there are still people capable of distinguishing hand-stitching from machine-stitching.”
“I’m capable of distinguishing a great many things.” Zandik crossed one leg over the other and laced his fingers on his knee. “But what interests me more at present is something else. The chart is nearly empty, and I prefer to know who I’m stitching back together.”
“Feofan Sergeyevich Veksel. Twenty-six years old. Bank…” a light pause. “…though that hardly matters anymore. I suffered the fate that ordinarily befalls those who see a little further than their station permits.” He moved his gaze back to Zandik. “No, I’m not complaining. My enterprise collapsed, and my associates found that disposing of me was considerably less trouble than negotiating. First came persuasion then four men in my living room and a revolver at close range. I tried to resist,” he almost smiled. “it was nearly touching. But one of them pulled the trigger all the same. Then darkness.”
“You were sold,” Zandik said. “Like expendable material. And you speak of it as one speaks of the weather.”
Feofan twitched the corner of his mouth.
“And what am I left with? Tears?” He gave a nearly ringing sound, and in it there still rang an echo of his former, drawing-room haughtiness. “I fear I have neither the strength nor the water in my body for weeping. Nor for anger, if one is being entirely candid. It demands too much heat, and I seem to have gone quite cold in here.”
He fell silent, absently regarding a crack in the ceiling. His chest rose and fell more evenly; his breathing steadied; but his eyelids were already growing heavy.
“You know,” he continued, and a barely perceptible hoarseness had begun to show, “I truly believed I could stay afloat. I worked myself to exhaustion, built combinations, each more elegant than the last…” he tilted his head slightly on the pillow, and the gesture came out slow, drifting. “And in the end I was ground down by my own people. Simply because I was not standing close enough to the sun.”
His lips were touched by a faint, faded smirk, a final flare of irony before weariness began to take its toll. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter and slower, with tiny pauses between phrases, as though each one cost him a little more than the last.
“There are people to whom everything is given by right of birth: position… money… power. They are like favourites of the sun, basking in its rays. And then there is everyone else.” His lashes trembled, dropped for a moment, then rose again with visible effort. “I was one of the everyone else. And when the sun’s darlings decided I was casting too long a shadow… they simply… removed me.”
On the last word his voice subsided to nearly a whisper. He shifted his gaze to Zandik, but even the turning of his head, the refocusing of his eyes, came out slowly, as though through water. His pupils were wide, his gaze drifting, and one could see plainly that he was holding on by his last reserves, clinging to the thread of conversation that was already slipping from his weakened fingers.
“That is how this world is made, Doctor,” he exhaled. “Some are raised up; others are thrown into the dirt. And no god will descend… from the heavens… to…”
He didn’t finish. His breathing levelled out and deepened; consciousness was ready to surrender to healing sleep. But he managed all the same to push out one final phrase, barely moving his lips:
“You’re a scientist… You must understand what I mean.”
He was almost sliding into a thick, murky drowsiness, where words still rang but were already losing their meaning, and so he did not flinch when cool fingers touched his wrist. Zandik meant to check the pulse, but the touch lasted too long. The pads of his fingers came to rest on the thin skin, over the place where a blue vein pulsed, and were still. Feofan felt their cold, sobering, nearly sobering, and his own pulse, which had suddenly grown louder, faster. He opened his eyelids a fraction to see Zandik, for some reason, looking not at the wrist and not at a watch to take a reading, but at his face. Then, becoming aware of it, one moment—and the fingers were gone. Zandik pulled his hand back and straightened up, and Feofan never understood whether it had been real or a fever-dream.
Zandik sat with one leg crossed over the other, his fingers laced on his knee, watching the pale face, the dark hair fanned across the pillow, the rise and fall of the chest beneath the coarse hospital fabric.
“Some are raised up; others are thrown into the dirt. And no god will descend from the heavens to…”
The words resounded in his head, and he turned them over again and again, like a skipping record. Not because they were beautiful, though, one had to admit, the phrasing was elegant, but because they had come from someone else’s lips as though he were voicing Zandik’s own thought. A thought that Zandik had been carrying for years. Gods, the Heavenly Principles, Celestia, and the inequality inscribed into the very fabric of this world. To some—everything; to others—dirt beneath their nails. And no one, no one would descend from the heavens to mend it.
He knew this. Expelled from the Akademiya, branded a heretic, having rebuilt himself from nothing, he knew this better than most. But to hear the same truth from the lips of a former bank clerk, from a boy from Ineevyi Prospekt, who had been wearing a hand-tailored coat just yesterday and was sleeping on stone today, that was… strange. Like catching a glimpse of one’s reflection in the window of an expensive boutique. Unexpected. And somehow, inexplicably, unsettling.
The chair beneath him creaked as he shifted his weight slightly. Feofan seemed to have spent the last of his strength on that tirade and now lay with his eyes nearly closed, his breathing shallow but steady. His lashes trembled faintly, signalling he wasn’t asleep. He was waiting for an answer.
“You are rather radical for a banker,” Zandik said at last. His voice came out dry, but within that dryness, it seemed to him, there was too much question.
First Feofan took a breath, slow and shallow (favouring the shoulder, Zandik noted automatically). Then the lashes stirred and lifted, and the lilac gaze, still clouded but more lucid than a minute before, came to rest on Zandik’s face.
“Former… banker,” he murmured. The word came out drawn-out and blurred, as though he were pulling it from somewhere very distant. “And former… for exactly that reason.”
He was quiet. His eyelids lowered again, either in thought or from exhaustion.
“Radicalism…” Feofan spoke again, and this time his voice carried something almost firm, as though he were arguing with someone invisible. “Radicalism in a world governed by gods… is simply…”
He faltered, blinked slowly, struggling to catch a slipping thought. Zandik watched his brow furrow, his lips move soundlessly through options. Finally, he exhaled:
“…common sense. Yes. Common sense.”
He gave an almost imperceptible nod to himself, and his head sank heavier into the pillow.
“And I am not radical… Doctor.” Feofan closed his eyes again. “I am simply…”
He didn’t finish. His breathing smoothed out and deepened, and Zandik had already decided the patient had fallen asleep without finishing his sentence. But then he spoke again.
“I am simply tired. So tired.” He turned his head on the pillow, and the gesture was so slowed, so drifting, that Zandik found himself following it with his eyes. “And cold… still cold. This gown of yours…” he touched the fabric with uncooperative fingers, and the gesture came out not disdainful, as before, but almost helpless. “It doesn’t warm. And the bed… why so hard? It’s… unconscionable.”
Zandik was silent. Something in this transition from near-philosophical generalisations to a complaint about the cold and a hard mattress moved him more than all the earlier disclosures. He had seen this before: patients who had passed through fear and pain often returned to the most simple, most physical things. Cold. Hard. Hurts.
“And the shoulder…” Feofan exhaled, and the breath shifted into something almost like a groan, “the shoulder hurts. It hurts so much, Doctor… if one is going to be entirely… candid.”
He released the fingers that had been gripping his knee this whole time, and rose. Zandik smoothed his cuff and said:
“I’ll give instructions for a painkiller,” he said, rising. “And for a gown. And a second pillow, since you’re so insistent. But your own clothes you won’t receive before the follow-up examination, which is in three days. Until then: rest, capsules three times a day, and ointment on the wound. Questions?”
“One… question,” Feofan exhaled. “They brought me here as material. Expendable. So why all this?” he waved his uncooperative hand vaguely, indicating either his sutured shoulder or attempting to gesture at the ward. “Stitching so… carefully. Even my liver…” he blinked, losing the thread, then found it again. “It’s not the best, but it would be far more useful. For one of your… tests. Wouldn’t it?”
Zandik stopped halfway to the door. He didn’t turn around.
“I am, first and foremost, a scholar,” he answered evenly. “And you are an interesting specimen.”
Zandik had already taken hold of the door handle when he heard a quiet, barely intelligible whisper from behind him. He went still.
“Tiffany…” Feofan murmured, without opening his eyes. “With red… I did say it, didn’t I? I didn’t dream it.”
Silence filled the ward. Zandik did not turn, but fingers on the door handle whitened.
“You were delirious during the operation,” he said evenly, without turning. “Nothing remarkable.”
“You’re lying, Doctor,” Feofan breathed, barely audibly. “I never become delirious. I am far too well-bred.” He gave a quiet, tired laugh. “But I confess, I don’t remember touching your face. Though it… seems to me that I did. Strange, isn’t it? The anaesthesia must have been very good.”
Zandik slowly turned his head. Feofan lay with closed eyes, a faint half-drunken smile drifting across his lips. He was clearly not fully conscious, hovering at the border of sleep and waking.
“I seem to have called you an ugliness,” he continued. “That was rude. Forgive me. I didn’t mean… that is, I did, but not in that sense… no matter. I’ve got confused.”
He yawned, flinching from the pain in his shoulder, and fell asleep.
Zandik stood in the doorway for another minute. Then very quietly, walked out into the corridor and drew the door closed behind him.
Feofan Sergeyevich Veksel, former banker.
Very, very interesting.